Mobile apps

On 25 February 2015, Facebook began rolling out a feature update that would aid suicide prevention. The effort was announced at the fifth annual Compassion Research Day at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The news first broke on the University of Washington website. The tool will allow users to flag concerning content on Facebook and notify it easily. Every now and then users see ‘I cannot take it anymore’, ‘Everything is just too much’ status updates and do not ...

Facebook has your data and it is going to use it. With its new service, Product Ads, the company is trying to simplify how businesses display ads. Product Ads is aimed at businesses that sell more than one product. Instead of displaying all the products to every customer, Facebook will help them display products to a particular user, ending the wild goose hunt for buyers, going direct by using the users’ interest and activity. All your likes, cookies, ad clicks, ...

When cellphones were first introduced to South Africa twenty years ago, the focus was almost entirely on the networks themselves. There were huge debates over rates, coverage, signal strength and benefits. It didn’t take long for the networks to become little more than tiny logos in the top right hand corner of the actual device. The quality gap between phones began to widen and consumer attention shifted towards the hardware itself. The ability to take and send grainy photographs or ...

We live in an app world. We shop through apps, we catch up with the latest news, we follow our sports teams, we listen to music, we communicate with friends and we do our work through apps.
We also do our banking through apps, albeit to a lesser extent. But there is a steady rise in the use of mobile banking apps among South Africans. The Mobility 2014 research, conducted by World Wide Worx, found that nine percent of respondents used ...

Facebook has announced new features for Facebook Groups designed to make it possible for members of “For Sale” groups to buy and sell. These new features will roll out to Facebook For Sale Groups globally in the coming months across iOS, Android and web.
The features allow Group members to choose the “Sell” feature when creating a post in a For Sale group. Furthermore, members can add descriptions of what they are selling, including a price and a pick up/ delivery ...

Microsoft, the software and hardware giant, is in the process of acquiring Sunrise, debatably the best calendar app on Android and iOS, according to TechCrunch sources.
The acquisition is rumoured to be at least around the US$100-million figure.
Sunrise works across platforms pulling information from various accounts. It has calendar products for mobile and desktop users that connects with and consolidates calendars from different providers. This is what has made it popular.
Read more: HoloLens, Continuum and Cortana: Microsoft’s Windows 10 playbook
Sunrise's rise ...

Welcome to our Weekly Roundup, our podcast that discusses tech trends, innovation and news of the last few days. This podcast edition is hosted by Kyle Hauptfleisch: Memeburn General Manager together with the rest of the Burn Media editorial team: André-Pierre du Plessis, Stuart Thomas, Andy Walker and Jacques Coetzee.
This week in tech has been dominated by financial earnings from the big tech companies. We have seen a few drops in revenue and also huge profits with Apple leading the ...

A new report by AppAnnie -- probably one of the most comprehensive application analytic firms out there -- found that although Google Play apps are being downloaded more and more each day, iTunes is seeing more return in cash.
As you probably know, Android is the dominating mobile operating system in our world today. With just under 1.5 million apps at the end of last year, Google Play is home to about 300 000 more apps than its Apple counterpart.
This echoes a ...

App Annie, the intelligence company and analyst firm, has released data on what apps people downloaded in December 2014. Interestingly, apps in two categories at seemingly opposite ends of the privacy spectrum -- security and selfie apps -- came out tops.
Dubsmash, an app by Mobile Motion, topped iOS charts with strong downloads. Dubsmash allows users to select a well-known song or a quote from popular celebrities and then record themselves singing that song in their words. During the December ...

A new report by appFigures, an analytics service that monitors data from the thousands of apps that use its platform, claims that Google's Play store grew by more than 50% last year, beating out the iOS app store for the first time as it did so.
The report looked at Google Play, the iOS App Store and Amazon’s app store and reported that all three had major growth but Google Play's was the most significant. Google Play ended the year ...